289 - The User Experience Episode

Hi. I'm Gary and this is EV Musings a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

On the show today we'll be looking at the user side of EV charging and why it’s not always optimal.

Our main topic of discussion today is user experience.

As a general rule of thumb I’m quite happy with the charging experience I have on the Public network. There have been one or two chargers that haven’t worked (or, more particularly, have started charging then stopped within 2 minutes while I was away using the facilities.)

But, generally I know how to start and stop chargers. I know which payment methods work best for me, which apps to download and which units need you to plug in authorise and which need you to authorise plug in.

But that’s a result of many factors - the biggest of which is that I’ve been doing this for almost 8 years now. I’ve seen and used all of the major networks across the UK, most of the different bits of hardware and most of the payment methods. There’s not many circumstances where I’m confronted with a situation that I can’t deal with.

But I know that this isn’t always the case for many people - especially people who are new to EV public charging and haven’t, perhaps, listened to or watched any of my podcasts that cover this topic.

This point was brought home to me recently when I was waiting to meet fellow EV podcaster, Liz Allan, and Craig Marsden for a day out looking at charger reliability. You'll remember Craig from last seasons episode 277 The Charger Accuracy Episdoe.

I arrived first at our agreed meeting charger to find a young lady in an older Tesla Model S parked at the Lidl 50kW charger staring at her phone and looking at the charger screen.

After a few moments it became obvious she was stuck so I offered my help. It transpired that the car was her brothers, she had never driven it before, he had leant it to her, the car was at 1% state of charge and she had no idea what to do.

Complicating matters was the fact that this wasn't a Tesla charger so the car wouldn't automatically charge AND the fact that because it was a Model S it had a connector that wasn't compatible with this unit without an adaptor.

Naturally she couldn't locate the adaptor. Which meant we were looking to use the AC connector to slow charge the car enough for her to get home.

Oh, and she had a literal new born baby (8 days old) in the back seat.

Under the best of circumstances this would have been a challenge. But the unit we were using - an ABB unit with both Chademo, CCS, and AC connectors on the same unit - had a small interface with little icons at one side and a not-very-intuitive design.

A very poor user experience.

In fact over the course of the next few minutes both Craig and I attempted to start the chargers on her behalf with a credit card and an RFID card and the user experience was so bad we were both unsuccessful . Craig tried again with a different card and things started up eventually.

In the parlance of our times she had encountered a user experience or UX issue. This relates to how the system as a whole operates together to either assist or inhibit the user from doing what they need to do.

Let's compare and contrast that with an experience I had over the Christmas break. I had my nephews and niece (21 - 25 years old) in the car on Boxing Day and we arrived at a Tesla V4 supercharger site open to the public.

I parked at the first unit and told my younger nephew 'Go plug me in, please'. He got out walked to the back of my car and - despite the fact he had never charged this vehicle before (as it’s a recently purchased model for me), nor had he seen or used a V4 supercharger - it took him less than 10 seconds to make the connection and I started the charge in the app while sitting in the driver's seat.

Two different experiences doing the same thing. One very, very easy, one far more difficult.

Another example of this (outside of charging) is when you go to a typical non-Amazon website to buy something and when it comes to paying you are sent to a third party provider to enter your payment details. A good user experience is to do what some sites do now which is allow you to pay using your phone via either Google pay or Apple Pay. Click the payment link on the website, authenticate on your phone and done. That’s a good user experience.

A bad user experience is when you have to manually enter your card details, expiry date and security code alongside your address details and - maybe even have some sort of independent 3rd party authentication performed - before you can pay. The end result is the same, the user journey is very much different.

Late last year I had an interesting conversation with someone who worked at a charger manufacturer. They were presenting their latest charger and I added a couple of user experience questions in the comments. In fact I started it with ‘I’m going to have a bit of a rant!’ The response that came back was - shall we say - more hardware focused than user focused.

Which got me to thinking: How difficult is it make a charger that has a good user experience?

(And as we move forward with this you’ll see that I do a lot of comparison with the way we used to do things with wet fuel dispensing - there’s a reason for this)

Let’s take a look at the issues I had with this particular charger and how it was explained to me.

First off this isn’t a rant about this particular charger - I’m not even going to link to the comment I made or identify the charger brand. But this is more of a general discussion about charger design as a concept rather than the issues with this charger specifically.

The first thing I talked about was the card reader. I’ve been to chargers where there’s a card reader by the screen and another card reader a bit lower down. One of these is for RFID cards (such as the Zapmap card), the other for bank payment cards. They are usually marked so you know which is which - but not always.

I’ve also been to chargers where there’s one reader only. Regardless of whether I’m using an RFID card or my bank card, I swipe in one place.

Which of those processes is better from a user point of view? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that having a single card reader is a better user experience. There’s no confusion about which card goes where and the process is familiar because everybody has swiped a card to pay for something.

As soon as you introduce a second card reader you’re hitting 2 potential problems.

- The first is that unless they are directly next to each other people often won’t see the second one.

- especially if one of them is right next to (or just below) the screen.

- The second issue is that users will not know which card needs to be swiped on which reader so the on-screen (or written instructions need to make this clear)

I’ve been to Kempower chargers where the RFID reader is directly below the screen but the payment card reader was located several feet lower on the column supporting the screen. Very easy to not notice if you don’t know what you’r looking for.

Then I moved on to the screen. Now I’ll be totally up front here and say that I think the ideal charger has no screen at all. You just plug a cable in and the car deals with everything ie Plug and Charge. (We’ll be talking more about this later in the season) But if we do have to have a screen does it have to be a tiny little screen?

Why are we reduced to trying to read instructions and initiate chargers from small, poorly designed screens?

In fact I’d go so far as to say if the screen was well laid out and designed there’s probably no issue with it being small.

But if we look at something like an ABB charger and compare it with a Kempower charger we see a couple of key differences. Both screens are around the same size. But the ABB unit has small icons down the side of the screen to allow you to select which connector you are using. It’s quite easy to miss these - or, to see them but not realise to what they refer. So that creates confusion with the users and confusion is not good. We’ll talk about ABB a little later on.

But the whole design of the user interface is an area where great improvements can be made. Some are actually quite good - I love the Kempower interface which allows you to monitor your charge by scanning a QR code and checking things out on your phone - But some are just not well thought out. The require the user to jump through a set of hoops to start and stop a charge.

This is particularly apparent when you are using a single charger that has 2 EVSEs I it.

An EVSE is a physical device that can charge an EV. On some units there is a single EVSE. That unit can charge one vehicle at a time. On some chargers there are 2 EVSEs. These can charge 2 vehicles simultaneously. Through 2 cables. ON some units there are 2 cables but only 1 EVSE. Which means that whoever is there first can charge and the other cable cannot be used at the same time. This often happens with Chademo and CCS connectors on the same unit.

With these units that have 2 EVSEs, there is still only a single screen to manage them which means we then get onto the next issue I have with the user experience:

Selecting a cable on the screen.

The user has to select the connector on the screen select the method of payment. Why?

If I attach the cable on the left of the unit to my car that should automatically indicate that I want to use that one. Likewise if I connect the cable on the right hand side. Why is there a disconnect here when there isn’t a disconnect with, say wet fuel pumps? Once I lift a wet fuel pump from the holster the system knows that’s the one I want to use. It’s intuitive and it works. Why is it so different for charging?

There will be CPOs out there that say ’But you’ve got to tell it which connector you’re using so it can lock that connector into the charge port and start the handshake between the car and the charger’. Fair enough. But if we need to select a connector using a touch screen how does plug and charge avoid this?

With plug and charge if I connect a single cable to my car it automatically starts the charge without me needing to tell it ‘Oh, I’m using the cable on the right of the charger’

This is the same methodology for Autocharge - the less secure charging process that operates with no user interaction. You plug the cable into your car and it starts connecting.

If it can work for plug and charge it can work for any other method.

Once again this is adding a layer of complexity to a system that is simply poor user experience.

Ironically if I’m using a double-headed AC charger such as those operated by bp Pulse or Podpoint, I don’t have to tell it which device I’m using. I just plug it in and present my payment card. It knows which of the two EVSEs I’m using and it starts the charge.

Then I went on to discuss the whole area of payment. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of pre-authorisations and comms with payment providers etc.

But I do want to look at this and say there’s a standard for this. On wet fuel stations I slide my card into the machine and it automatically knows I’m paying by card. It knows which card I am using as well. It doesn’t ask me to select ‘Are you paying by card or cash?’ It knows. This is the user experience I want with a non PnC device. Why is that so difficult?

Now I have talked about this off-line and one argument that’s used to justify a lot of this is cost. It’ll cost more money to add in this sort of functionality. I don’t disagree with this.

But when you’re looking at a unit that can be anything up to £30,000 to buy - and even more to install - and CPOs are buying these by the dozen (or even higher for some sites - Instavolt Winchester has 44 of them) will the cost of these mods make such a dramatic difference?

I wonder if charger designers (and CPOs) recognise that there are currently suboptimal user experiences that are a direct result of the engineering design aspects of a charger?

Do they recognise that Tesla chargers - which have exactly the same engineering design constraints as non Tesla chargers - do not have these UX issues? Even using the Tesla app is easier than using an app with other chargers - and the Tesla app isn’t designed purely for charging, it’s a general Tesla app which just happens to include charging in its functionality.

So, let’s take a step back and look at where we are:

We have a unit which does everything you would expect an ultra rapid charger to do : It connects to a car, it accepts payment and it dispenses electrical energy at various speeds. But as a user coming to this fresh there are things that would make the process simpler to use.

- Make the payment process intuitive: Give me one place to swipe a card - either payment card or RFID card. If I swipe a bank card I’m paying by bank card. If I swipe an RFID card I’m paying by RFID card. Don’t make me tell you what I’m going to do before I do it.

- Once I’m authorised - or even before I’m authorised - if I connect one of two or more cables available on the machine to my charge port, the charger should know that this is the cable I want to use. I mean it’s hardly complicated is it? If I’m on an Ionity that is, generally, one cable per unit it knows which cable I’m at (it also knows when the cable is connected as it tells you to plug it in then starts the handshake as soon as you’ve done that. No pressing a button to do this). If I’m at a charger with two cables and one is being used then, by definition I’m going to be using the other one. If I’m at a Circontrol unit that has 3 possible connectors, then once I plug one of the three into my car that will be the only one where the connector pins make a circuit so that must be the one that has been selected, right?

Is it really rocket science?

In summary I think it’s relatively easy to create an engineered solution that is both practical, secure, and robust. The payment processing works, the screens work, the charger works.

But in a lot of cases the user experience when using these chargers is suboptimal.

I’m not telling tales out of school but I was invited to Gridserve’s secret development facility about 18 months back prior to when they launched their app. As part of this we were walked through the engineering labs where I had the opportunity to ask the guys there a few questions. My first one was

“Why can I walk down a line of Gridserve chargers and stop every one of them just by pushing a button on the screen with no authorisation?’

The answer was ‘That’s the design of the hardware we’ve chosen’

So my follow up question was ‘What are you doing to try and stop that happening’

Their reply was ‘We’ve changed the stop button on the screen from red to green so it matches the other buttons. There’s nothing else we can do’

To which I replied ‘Yes there is: Change your hardware to something that’s more user friendly’

In a totally unrelated piece of news I see that the new expansion at the Gridserve site at Beaconsfield is going to be using Alpitronic hardware rather than ABB.

Good for them.

The experience Liz, Craig, and I had with the young lady trying to charge the Tesla showed that there is obviously some issue with how they have designed their user interface. If three relatively knowledgable EV users had problems getting it to start then that obviously needs looking at.

This issue was brought home to me more recently with a charging issue I encountered on a 7kW charger at the venue of a conference I attended.

The TL;DR on this was the charger locked my cable into the unit and I ended up calling the help desk for, you know, help.

Unfortunately, the number I had went through to a company that no longer supported the chargers in questions. It took a while to determine this because the phone signal was bad. When we finally worked out who managed these chargers I had to find some way of noting down a phone number using the phone I was currently using to call the help desk.

Then I called the second help desk who were very pleasant but not helpful at all.

The resolution to the problem was to reboot the charger in which the cable was trapped. This would release the cable and I could continue.

But the second help desk had no access to the actual charger and couldn’t do anything. They weren’t really a help desk, they were a call centre who were just raising tickets and passing them on to the engineers who also - it seems - didn’t have access to the charger software and wold need to come out and physically turn the charger off at the cabinet.

This is, obviously, not ideal under any circumstances, let alone for someone who - unlike me - didn’t know what the quick solution was.

In fact, I’ve heard tell of people who carry around specific cabinet keys so they can unlock the units and power them down to release cables. But, obviously, this is not ideal (In fact it is quite vehemently discouraged for the majority of the public.), but it’s certainly an option that doesn’t leave you at the mercy of the CPO engineers…

As prep for this episode I contacted the individual who’s LinkedIn page caused my to start this conversation and asked him if he would come on to the show and chat. He was enthusiastic about it but then suddenly went radio silent. I told him I’m doing the episode with or without him and he still didn’t answer. If you are listening to this and want a right of reply you know where to reach me.

What are your thoughts on this whole aspect of the charging experience? I’d love to hear any tales of poor user experience at chargers (not The charger didn’t work or was blocked’, but ‘I found it difficult to get the charger to start, or it was confusing, or things like that).

Drop me a line at info@evmusings.com or a comment (and like and subscribe) on the YouTube.

I hope you enjoyed listening to today’s show.

If you’ve reached this part of the podcast and are still listening - thank you. Why not let me know you’ve got to this point by messaging me @musingsev.bsky.social with the words Putting the User First #ifyouknowyouknow Nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co founder Simon. You know he’s never had an issue at a charger…

Thanks for listening

Bye!